August 23, 2010

Leveraging Anxiety, Part 1

Part of how we advertising and marketing hacks stay employed is by keeping our clients in a constant state of anxiety about the future.

The more we can convince our clients that everything is changing around them -- and they need us to interpret the changes -- the longer we stay in business.

Consequently, every few years we come up with a new "thing that will change everything" to get them all hysterical and jumpy.

The pundits who predicted that digital technology would spawn the death of ad agencies missed this point entirely.

Digital technology isn't destroying the agency business. It's just presenting a new generation of ad and marketing hacks with a new "thing that will change everything" which they can frighten clients with and build businesses around.

The thing that makes all the hysteria so silly and unwarranted is how quickly consumers digest and adjust to "the future" and how seamlessly it arrives.

We have a vision of "the future" as a startling new thing that will confuse and disorient us. In fact, it works in quite the opposite way. Someone introduces something astounding -- a mobile phone with a touch screen that can surf the web, play video, and take photos -- and in about three weeks we're ready for something new.

Marketers are prone to assuming that technological advances are going to lead to large scale disruptions of consumer behavior. They have conferences about it every two weeks. In fact, consumers have developed a breathtaking ability to incorporate astounding technological advances into their lives without much disruption to their traditional behavior patterns.

As in every generation, there have been a few recent technological changes that have had substantial impact on consumer behavior.

Nonetheless, one of the untold stories of the digital age is the surprising degree to which consumer economic behavior has remained stable in light of a revolution in technology, communication, and media.

Ad Contrarian Says:

"Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."